USA Today: Dissent by Justice Thomas in election case draws fire for revisiting baseless Trump fraud claims

USA Today: Dissent by Justice Thomas in election case draws fire for revisiting baseless Trump fraud claims

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, said the dissent appears to suggest that state supreme courts are not qualified to decide election issues in their state, which she described as a "direct violation" of the division of power between the states and federal government. "The state legislature does not have free reign to limit access to the ballot without judicial review," Albert said. "In this case, the court found that the laws as written in the current state of a global pandemic were unconstitutional infringements on the right to vote."

WASHINGTON – A blistering dissent in a high-profile election case written by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas prompted blowback Monday from Democrats who accused one of the court’s most conservative members of embracing baseless claims of voter fraud promoted by President Donald Trump after the November election.

In an 11-page dissent from the court’s decision not to take up a challenge to the expanded use of mail ballots in Pennsylvania, Thomas acknowledged that the outcome of the election was not changed by the way votes were cast in the battleground state. But he raised questions about the reliability of mail-in voting that echoed many of the same arguments Trump raised in the weeks before and after the election.

The dissent followed the court’s decision Monday to turn away a challenge to accommodations the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court made for mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic. The state, one of a handful of tossups that ultimately led to the election of President Joe Biden, allowed absentee ballots to be received up to three days after Election Day, even in cases where those ballots did not have a clear Nov. 3 postmark.

In the end, despite the partisan rancor over the issue and a bevy of lawsuits, there were too few ballots at issue to make a difference in the outcome in the Keystone State. But Thomas and two other conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, said the legal questions should have been taken up by the high court to guide future elections.   …

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, said the dissent appears to suggest that state supreme courts are not qualified to decide election issues in their state, which she described as a “direct violation” of the division of power between the states and federal government.

“The state legislature does not have free reign to limit access to the ballot without judicial review,” Albert said. “In this case, the court found that the laws as written in the current state of a global pandemic were unconstitutional infringements on the right to vote.”